Where, oh where is the flatulently listless anti-gluten crowd, deafening us with their whining about how even the thought of grain makes their villi die off faster than orphans in Thatcher's Britain and how terrible are we to force them to live in such a gruel, wheaty world?

Kinek:I'm incredibly skeptical of the claims of 30% by introgressing resistance sections into modern wheat. And BBC doesn't talk about whether we're dealing with tetraploid or hexaploid wheat. Bad BBC. Bad.

Most people have no clue what tetraploid and hexaploid even means. If they had included that information then they'd have to explain what that means and why it matters and the story would be 3 times longer. We love to give science journalism a hard time here but we need to be realistic in our expectations too.

Befuddled:Great. So instead of dealing with the incredibly destructive human overpopulation, we can keep going up and up population-wise. Because there's no downside as long as people can be fed, right?

We should have been dealing with overpopulation back in the seventies instead of developing better strains of the staple crops.

Population is near the peak of a bell curve and predicted to start leveling off and then dropping within a few decades.

Sudo_Make_Me_A_Sandwich:Befuddled: Great. So instead of dealing with the incredibly destructive human overpopulation, we can keep going up and up population-wise. Because there's no downside as long as people can be fed, right?

We should have been dealing with overpopulation back in the seventies instead of developing better strains of the staple crops.

Population is near the peak of a bell curve and predicted to start leveling off and then dropping within a few decades.

The last I read on the subject claimed that this is due to massively decreased birthrates in cities and the fact that more people live in cities than don't. It seems like the future will be massive population centers with sparse population in between in which case the planet can tolerate a much higher population than it currently has and still leave huge amounts of land as wilderness or semi-wilderness.

Egoy3k:Sudo_Make_Me_A_Sandwich: Befuddled: Great. So instead of dealing with the incredibly destructive human overpopulation, we can keep going up and up population-wise. Because there's no downside as long as people can be fed, right?

We should have been dealing with overpopulation back in the seventies instead of developing better strains of the staple crops.

Population is near the peak of a bell curve and predicted to start leveling off and then dropping within a few decades.

The last I read on the subject claimed that this is due to massively decreased birthrates in cities and the fact that more people live in cities than don't. It seems like the future will be massive population centers with sparse population in between in which case the planet can tolerate a much higher population than it currently has and still leave huge amounts of land as wilderness or semi-wilderness.

If you can convince (force) everyone to live in a Todos Santos-style megalopolis, then it might work. Otherwise not. Get used to more forest destruction, soil depletion, and drought.

Bullshiat...this is EXACTLY what they did to breed this new plant. It wouldn't involve genetic modification if they'd discovered that adding, say additional minerals to the growing soil would increase productivity by 30%. But they didn't do that. Instead they played around with its genetics...they MODIFIED them...to gain the productivity, same as farmers have been doing for eons.

What they didn't do is add sea slug genes, or genes from the bladderwort or other unrelated plant to a pre-existing genome. But to claim they didn't do any genetic modification is a bald faced lie.

Stone Meadow:FTFA: The process required no genetic modification of the crops.

Bullshiat...this is EXACTLY what they did to breed this new plant. It wouldn't involve genetic modification if they'd discovered that adding, say additional minerals to the growing soil would increase productivity by 30%. But they didn't do that. Instead they played around with its genetics...they MODIFIED them...to gain the productivity, same as farmers have been doing for eons.

What they didn't do is add sea slug genes, or genes from the bladderwort or other unrelated plant to a pre-existing genome. But to claim they didn't do any genetic modification is a bald faced lie.

When they say GM, they mean targeted acting factors, usually introduced through biolistic, agrobacterium mediated vectors.

What happened here was not GM. They basically just made wheat marry it's great great great grandparent and have disgusting little wheat babies.

Stone Meadow:What they didn't do is add sea slug genes, or genes from the bladderwort or other unrelated plant to a pre-existing genome. But to claim they didn't do any genetic modification is a bald faced lie.

Zeno-25:Stone Meadow: What they didn't do is add sea slug genes, or genes from the bladderwort or other unrelated plant to a pre-existing genome. But to claim they didn't do any genetic modification is a bald faced lie.

Hybridization =! genetic modification.

Actually, is *IS* genetic modification, it's just not direct manipulation of the DNA.

Kinek:Stone Meadow: FTFA: The process required no genetic modification of the crops.

Bullshiat...this is EXACTLY what they did to breed this new plant. It wouldn't involve genetic modification if they'd discovered that adding, say additional minerals to the growing soil would increase productivity by 30%. But they didn't do that. Instead they played around with its genetics...they MODIFIED them...to gain the productivity, same as farmers have been doing for eons.

What they didn't do is add sea slug genes, or genes from the bladderwort or other unrelated plant to a pre-existing genome. But to claim they didn't do any genetic modification is a bald faced lie.

When they say GM, they mean targeted acting factors, usually introduced through biolistic, agrobacterium mediated vectors.

What happened here was not GM. They basically just made wheat marry it's great great great grandparent and have disgusting little wheat babies.

Egoy3k:Sudo_Make_Me_A_Sandwich: Befuddled: Great. So instead of dealing with the incredibly destructive human overpopulation, we can keep going up and up population-wise. Because there's no downside as long as people can be fed, right?

We should have been dealing with overpopulation back in the seventies instead of developing better strains of the staple crops.

Population is near the peak of a bell curve and predicted to start leveling off and then dropping within a few decades.

The last I read on the subject claimed that this is due to massively decreased birthrates in cities and the fact that more people live in cities than don't. It seems like the future will be massive population centers with sparse population in between in which case the planet can tolerate a much higher population than it currently has and still leave huge amounts of land as wilderness or semi-wilderness.

For current example, see China..

Large populations in large cities with vast tracts of land in between

If China could ever find a way to modernize its farming systems, while simultaneously finding something worthwhile for the released labor to do, it would rival the US..

/yes, I am ignoring issues like pollution and desertification for the moment

Saiga410:Kinek: Stone Meadow: FTFA: The process required no genetic modification of the crops.

Bullshiat...this is EXACTLY what they did to breed this new plant. It wouldn't involve genetic modification if they'd discovered that adding, say additional minerals to the growing soil would increase productivity by 30%. But they didn't do that. Instead they played around with its genetics...they MODIFIED them...to gain the productivity, same as farmers have been doing for eons.

What they didn't do is add sea slug genes, or genes from the bladderwort or other unrelated plant to a pre-existing genome. But to claim they didn't do any genetic modification is a bald faced lie.

When they say GM, they mean targeted acting factors, usually introduced through biolistic, agrobacterium mediated vectors.

What happened here was not GM. They basically just made wheat marry it's great great great grandparent and have disgusting little wheat babies.

Go on....

One of the reasons why I'm so hesitant about this announcement is that when you backcross the wheat to a progenitor line, you're going to get linkage drag from the wild alleles that are close to the resistance alleles. I'm actually working on something similar in Barley, and while you can pull some resistance alleles in with a nearly identical line (save for the resistance gene), it's going to take years and years and years in a system as complex as wheat, and even then, this assumes that pathotypes don't change between then and now.

I'm interested to see where they got the 30% and if this is based off of english only pathogens.

theorellior:Kinek: it's going to take years and years and years in a system as complex as wheat

Can you elaborate on wheat's complexity for the educated layman? I'm for serious, I love this stuff.

I wrote a giant post but the internet ate it.

Essentially there are three problems. Wheat's genome is five times the size of a humans. People have ~3 billion base pairs. Wheat has 15 billion. In addition to this, wheat also has three sets of chromosomes, which means that for some genes there can be as many as six copies floating around somewhere. Some of these are divergent, which means they don't do the same things, others are similar but are active under different circumstances. For highly similar sequences, sometimes it's hard to tell what exactly you're looking at. And Wheat is exceptionally hard to do transformations with. It doesn't respond well as a callus, so we can't validate genes transgenically like we can in Maize or Soy. Along with this, wheat doesn't have near the funding that most of the other major crops do. The chinese support rice, we do Maize and Soy. Everything else sorta sucks in comparison.